Ethnic Studies Department Welcomes New Assistant Professor Lydia Heberling
By Sophia Lincoln
Lydia Heberling
The Ethnic Studies Department welcomed Assistant Professor Lydia Heberling as one of CLA’s 2021-22 Ethnic Studies Cluster Hires. This search was designed to attract a group of academics invested in equitable and inclusive teaching and dedicated to scholarly contributions in this area. All have been involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in their departments, our college, the university, and the community.
Herberling’s areas of expertise are in American Indian literatures, with a focus on the literatures from Indigenous California, as well as the emerging field of critical surf studies. Her most recent work focuses on aesthetic and formal innovations in twentieth and twenty-first-century California Native literatures. She is currently working on an article that examines the relationship between colonialism, catastrophic waters, and surfing in three creative non-fiction works by Indigenous writers.
Before coming to Cal Poly, Heberling earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington in 2021. While working on her dissertation, Heberling taught classes on various subjects, ranging from writing composition to Indigenous research methods.
Heberling was drawn to California, where she had grown up, as it became the first state in the nation to pass a law requiring ethnic studies in public high school curriculum. The new requirement will take effect in 2025. “There’s a lot of really exciting energy that is happening in ethnic studies departments across California, and especially at Cal Poly,” Heberling said. “I’m really excited as someone who grew up in California to see this more expansive, intercultural education being promoted and encouraged.”
Heberling will teach Introduction to American Indian Studies (ES 253) each quarter for her first two years at Cal Poly, and she also hopes to add in additional courses soon. As a part of the cluster hire, the college also looks forward to any new courses she might choose to propose and create in future quarters.
“It is really exciting to me that I get to have 130 new Cal Poly students in my classroom once a quarter for ten weeks to talk about issues in American Indian studies,” Heberling said. “This is what I look forward to –– walking students through that process of unlearning and then re-learning.”
In a broader sense, Heberling is also looking forward to helping fill in the educational gaps that were missing in her own public-school education.
“As someone who identifies –– in all of the complex ways that this is true –– as a settler with some Mexican American and Hispanic background and some of the complicated identity formations that come out of that, we didn’t hear a lot about Native culture and presence growing up here,” Heberling said. “So, that’s what my dissertation focused on, and that’s what I'm hoping to do at Cal Poly.”